Control of Solid Oxide Fuel Cells for Power Tracking

Solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC) are receiving notice as an attractive technology for electricity generation. Their high efficiency, low pollution, scalability, and high performance in partial loads make them an attractive candidate for distributed generation. In these applications, power tracking (ability to provide variable levels of power) with minimal storage is a highly desirable feature. While the underlying electrochemistry allows rapid changes in power levels, the resulting thermal stress could have significant adverse effect on the durability and integrity of the system. A variety of concepts from systems point of view are used to address this challenge. These include selection and design of controllers, as well as alternative approaches to operation and design.
Faryar Jabbari has been a faculty member in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department of the University of California, Irvine (UCI) since 1986. He has served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control and Automatica, Program Committee Chair for IEEE Conference on
Decision and Control (CDC-09) and American Control Conference (ACC-11), as well as leading a few technical committees (IFAC, Hugo O Shock Prize, etc.) His energy related work is in collaboration with the Advance Power and Energy Program (APEP) of UCI.